If you regularly use Google Meet instead of Zoom for online meetings, then it is possible to track the attendance of those who were at the meeting, including the time they joined and when they exited. The feature was launched earlier this year as the need for virtual meetings arose due to the pandemic.
Google Workspace Education Plus and the Teaching and Learning Upgrade users will now automatically receive an attendance report anytime a meeting has two or more participants. Previously, attendance tracking was limited to meetings with five or more participants.
Attendance reports include the following information:
- Participant’s name
- Participant’s email
- Overall length of time a participant was on the call.
The feature is ON by default and can be switched off in the Admin console. Other Google Workspace users can turn attendance tracking reports on or off from Meet or Google Calendar. If somehow you find you’re unable to use the feature and would like to enable it, follow these steps;
- Open Meet (in a web browser) and set up a meeting.
- Once the meeting starts, you will need to locate the “Host Control” feature at the bottom right of the screen.
- Toggle “Attendance Tracking” on once you see it.
Google says the host will receive an email with an attached Google Sheets attendance report. The report will show a different tab with metrics for every time you start and stop the meeting.
You can also use a chrome extension to track attendance in meet.google.com. Once you have successfully installed this extension a new tab title Track Attendance will be appearing at the bottom left of the google meet platform.
On clicking that tab, the attendance tracking script will start automatically and show how long the attendance is being monitored and clicking on that button again would generate the attendance report.
The attendance report will contain the following details :
1. Attendance tracking start time,
2. Attendance tracking stop time,
3. Total number of persons attended the meeting,
4. Total class duration ,
5. Count of people who attended more than 65% duration of the class,
6. Count of people who attended less than 65% duration of the class,
7. List of all the people names with their total attended duration and their attendance percentage
8. The data of people who attended less than 65% duration of the class will be highlighted in red color
This extension was made specially for teachers to track the attendance of their students in online class during this pandemic. It can also be used to have a general overview after the end of the meeting since it can give you details like how many attended and how many attended more than 65% duration of the meeting etc.
